The use of portable communication devices such as mobile telephones, PDA's, etc. has exploded in the last decade. Many people use their portable communication devices regularly throughout the day and carry them wherever they go. The portable communication devices are usually equipped with screens which can display a variety of information and can be used to conduct business transactions. For example, a customer may call a service provider, for example, a bus company, and buy a ticket for bus travel. The problem becomes how can the service provider send a receipt for the purchase to the customer which the customer can then use to obtain the purchased good or service.
A known method for providing a receipt is to create a barcode or data matrix which can be ready by a scanner. The scanner interprets the series of bars or data matrix to determine the coded message which represents a receipt for the purchased good or service.
One method for providing a receipt for a customer would be to create a barcode or data matrix representing the receipt and send the barcode or data matrix to the customer. In order to send a barcode or data matrix, the service provider would have to send the barcode or data matrix using multimedia messaging service (MMS). The graphical display of the barcode or data matrix can then be displayed on the screen of the portable communication device.
There are, however, several problems and drawbacks to using such a system. First of all, not all portable communication devices are configured to have MMS capabilities. Furthermore, not all communication systems can handle MMS. In addition multimedia content created for one brand of MMS device may not be entirely compatible with the capabilities of the other MMS devices. Furthermore, the recipient's MMS device is responsible for providing for content application, e.g. image resizing, audio codes transcoding, etc. which might render the barcode or data matrix unreadable. Finally, MMS is relatively expensive to use and places payload and power burdens on the communication system.
Thus, there is a need for a new method and apparatus for sending a graphical representation of a receipt for goods and services which overcomes the problems cited above.